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ENGL 10 (Baker, Fall 2025) Hauntings and Hollow Places: Keywords & Subject Headings

Hauntings and Hollow Places: Investigating the Unheimlich in Detective Horror Fiction

Keywords

  • Keywords are the essential words that best describe your topic. These are your own words -- they can be people, places, themes, characters, time periods, or any other concrete term. 

 

  • Avoid using adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and other terms that are not considered essential to your topic. 

 

  • Use quotation marks to search for exact phrases:
    • "horror literature" 
    • "victorian gothic"
    • "mental illness"

 

  • Using keywords allows you to combine different concepts. Each concept is separated by AND. Your search results must include all your keywords:

    • trauma* AND mother*

    • "haunting of hill house" AND "domestic space"

 

  • The asterisk* symbol will include alternate endings to your root word: 

    • horr* will retrieve all records with the word horror, horrors, horrific, horrible, horrifying
    • trauma* will retrieve trauma, traumas, traumatic
    • mother* will retrieve mother, mothers, mothering, motherhood

 

  • Use OR to include synonyms and similar terms. This will increase your results by retrieving any of the terms that are separated by OR:
    •  macabre OR grotesque OR horrific OR unearthly
    • "mental illness" OR madness OR insanity OR hysteria

 

Searching with Boolean

Learn how to use Boolean Operators like AND, OR, and NOT to craft a search strategy in UC Library Search and other search tools.

Searching with Boolean from UCSB Library Teaching and Learning on YouTube

Need help with your research? Visit us online: library.ucsb.edu/ask.

Use https://bit.ly/search-boolean-AD to find an audio description player for this video.

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